Liza Lim

Liza Lim is an Australian composer, educator, and leader in the contemporary music community. Influenced by Asian ritual, Aboriginal art, and non-western languages, she has composed several operas and a large number of chamber and orchestral works. She was born in Perth in 1966 and her parents were Chinese; both worked as doctors. She spent her childhood in Brunei, where her parents were employed. They were occupied with demanding work schedules, and Lim and her two sisters were sent to a boarding school, where they had piano and violin instruction. Later they returned to Australia, and Lim attended the Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Melbourne. Her talent as a composer was obvious to her music instructors, and they encouraged her to change her focus from performing to composing. After she graduated in the early '80s, she earned a BA from the Victorian College of the Arts, a MM from the University of Melbourne, and a PhD from the University of Queensland. She also received additional instruction from Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam. She began a long collaboration with the Elision Ensemble shortly after its formation in 1986, and they have since performed and recorded several of her works. Also an educator, Lim taught composition at the University of Melbourne in 1991, and she has served as a guest lecturer at several institutions including the University of California in San Diego, Cornell University, the Darmstadt Summer school, and many universities in Australia. In 1996, she was awarded the Young Australian Creative Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Australian Council, and in 2002 she received the APRA Classical Music Award for best composition. She continued to receive enthusiastic feedback for her music and in 2004, she won the Paul Lowin Award for her orchestral work Ecstatic Architecture. Lim was appointed composer-in-residence with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra from 2005 to 2007, which led to the 2006 premiere of The Compass. The following year, she accepted a residency in Berlin, where she composed her third opera, The Navigator. Based on the story of Tristan und Isolde, it was first performed at the 2008 Brisbane Festival. She also took an appointment at the University of Huddersfield as the Director of the Centre for Research in New Music. Lim cofounded the Akademie der Künste der Welt in 2012 and remained a collaborator until 2016. She joined the composition department of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 2017 and was composer-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin from 2021 to 2022. Residing in Melbourne, Lim continues to be very active as a composer, lecturer, and guest artist. Her music can be found on the Elision Ensemble’s Singing in Tongues album from 2021, and on the 2023 releases Density 2036: VI, VII, VIII, and Liza Lim: Annunciation Triptych.
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